"Fuck." Was the first word that Haera said, her eyes never leaving the creature that still battled with the Goddess's barrier — the first of the many curses that left her mouth. It was only when she stopped did anyone else dare to speak.

"Is that all?" Larc teased as he panted, resting on his knees. "You give me the impression that you know a lot more curses than that."

"I can't waste all of them now, Dragon-born. I like to save the best ones for special occasions." She pulled out a flask from the side of a satchel and downed a mouthful of its contents.

"Is everyone okay?" I asked from where I laid on the ground. My legs were thankful that they finally got the rest they deserved.

"We're fine," my sister replied. "What about you? Are you hurt? You're the one who was the closest to that thing."

Shaking my head, I sat up. "No. I'm fine too."

"Did you know this was here?" Larc questioned, his golden eyes pinning me down, ready to interrogate me. "There is no way we would have found this otherwise, even if we weren't being chased. It was completely off of our route."

"Not that we had much of a route in the first place," Haera quipped. "All we did was run and hope for the best."

"I didn't know. It felt like I was being tugged over here by my power, like the Goddess was guiding me here." Now that we were safely inside the barrier, my magic had calmed and no longer flared beneath my skin. I didn't think it was even possible for it to surface like it had when I was mostly drained from healing Larc.

"Do you happen to know what that thing is?" My sister nudged the Dragon-born with her boot, causing mud to stain his tattered trousers. "Was it your plan to lure the creature to us to kill us off?"

Larc blew out a sigh. "I did not entice it out here, nor do I have a clue as to what it is. I've dealt with some strange creatures before, but nothing like that. My sword didn't even pierce it." His gaze fell to the shadowed beast still battling with the Goddess's magic. "Do you think the barrier will hold?"

"It should do," I confirmed. The magic around us felt ancient — a much older strand of the power I had been blessed with. If it was going to fail, it would have done so long ago.

After a few more attempts at biting the blue light that kept it from us, the creature backed away into the trees, growing bored of its futile attacks. A blanket of safety fell over us as it left our view, but I knew it was still lurking close by, waiting for us to leave the barrier.

"What is this place? Do you think the Lyre is here?" Haera questioned, getting to her feet and pulling out a blade from a satchel she saved.

"It's not." Larc frowned. "We would be able to tell if it was."

I nodded in agreement. "The only power here that I can feel is the wall surrounding the tower." The protective barrier was a wonder in itself. All the Goddess's magic was ever known for was healing — not whatever this was. From all the records in the Temple about the Goddess, a tower or the ruins of one was never mentioned.

"Well, we might as well find out what's inside the tower while we're here." Haera extended her hand to help me up and I gratefully accepted it. "It could hold some sort of answer to the Lyre and anything would be helpful at this point."

We approached the ruins with caution and entered with the same vigilance. After seeing how the tower separated into several different paths, we agreed to split up and search, not straying too far from each other so we could assist someone if they got into trouble.

I pushed a door that had begun to rot in the hope that it would reveal a room, but it refused to budge. However, after throwing my body against it, it finally gave way and opened.

Despite the darkness and dust that coated the room, I could still make out the small library that was hidden inside. Several bookshelves lined the walls, with the occasional one having fallen over, and each was overflowing with stacks upon stacks of books. Whoever had spent their time here previously had clearly struggled to find space for all of them. A couple of moth-eaten chairs sat on either end of a table, providing the perfect space to read.

I walked up to one of the shelves and read the spines of the books resting there. Gemstones and Where To Find Them were the silver words engraved onto a dark purple cover. Secrets of the Dead read another more suspicious-looking tome. An Intermediate Guide to Healing Herbs was one that looked a little more worn than the others.

I picked up the last one, eager to find out if the same healing methods were used when the tower still thrived with life as today. The front cover, which was the shade of a pool of water at night, crumbled in my hands, but that didn't deter me from flicking through the first few pages. As I focused on the words, some faded and some not, I didn't notice the small, dark bug that slithered on my fingers.

Dropping the book with a squeal, I stepped away from the bookshelves as quickly as I could. It seemed the books had been abandoned by their owner, but they had received some new residents instead.

Larc peered around the corner of the doorway to search for what all the commotion was. When his eyes fell to the book on the floor and then to my shaking hands, a stifled laugh pushed through his lips.

"What's so funny?" I glowered, wiping my hands on my shirt.

"Nothing, nothing," he replied with a shake of his head, though the soft twist of his smile betrayed his words. "Have you found anything interesting?"

"There are a few books on healing that are interesting, but nothing that's actually useful to help us find the Lyre." I watched as the Dragon-born joined my search, picking up books and brushing the dust off of them to read their titles.

There had to be something here, I refused to believe otherwise. Why else would an isolated tower be suspiciously located in the middle of a forest? In the middle of nowhere? My mind trailed back to the beast and how its eyes glowed fiercely with the same shade of blue as my power, with the same colour of the sparks that floated in the air and the barrier that surrounded us. It felt too uncanny to not have something to do with the Goddess. Whoever spent their time in the tower, whether it be another person or the Goddess herself, had to know something about them.

The only question that needed to be answered was was the information documented?

Larc picked up another book and his dark brows furrowed. "Lovers of the Ocean — a tale about a siren and a..." his voice grew quieter while his eyes widened after each word he read, a faint pink emerging on his cheeks. "I see what you mean about interesting but not useful."

A matching tinge crept up my neck as I snatched the book away from him, placing it back on a shelf. "Don't let Haera see you with a story like that, she'll pry it from you by any means possible."

The Dragon-born smirked in surprise. "Perhaps I should bring it with me as a peace offering, after thoroughly checking the pages for bugs, of course."

"That might not actually be a bad idea."

After searching the library a little more with nothing to prove our hunt successful, Larc leant against the doorway, deep in thought. "Who is the Goddess anyway? What made her so special compared to every other human?"

I placed the book I held down. "How much do you know already?"

"Before I left the camp we had set up, all I knew was that she was a powerful human and had a Lyre that my queen wants — one that can wipe out all of humanity. Then, when I met you, I found out that she blesses people with her magic?" Confusion riddled his expression.

Nodding in response, I began to explain what I had been taught growing up. "Supposedly she rewards the people who inspire her the most or those who have the strength to do great things. It was several centuries ago, but the Goddess saved the humans from a plaguing darkness that threatened to decay everything in sight. Despite only being a healer from a small village, she picked up a sword, fought for her kingdom and ended up saving us all." That was the reason why I believed the Goddess had chosen me to harness a kernel of her power. I hadn't picked up a blade and charged towards terrifying darkness, but the fact that I was a healer from a small village must have resonated with her.

"Was it mentioned how exactly she saved you?" Larc questioned. "Because my sword didn't fare too well against the darkness we encountered."

"No. It might have been mentioned before, but the stories are so old now that the information has probably been twisted. Now they only talk of her sword and her power." I frowned, turning the Dragon-born's words over in my mind. "Do you think that creature was the darkness she fought?"

"It's a safe assumption to make, considering how its coat was quite literally made of shadows." His golden eyes narrowed. "What else do you know about her?"

"There are other stories of her — like how she saved a washed-up sailor who had been lost at sea, or how she tended to a dying bird that ended up being born of fire — but they don't relate to how she really became the Goddess."

Before I could mention a few more of the stories that I had adored hearing from the Temple, Haera stuck her head around the doorway of the library. "Is there a ladder or a step stool of some kind in here? I think I found something."

Despite the wood being partially rotten with patches of mould growing over the base, there was a small ladder in the corner of the room that had been used to help get books from higher shelves. I picked it up and passed it to my sister.

"What is it?" Larc asked as we followed close behind her to the location of her discovery. We stopped in front of a crumbling ledge, a gap in the brickwork of the tower providing the perfect window to light the area.

"Do you see that?" Haera pointed up towards the ceiling where a faint blue glow could be seen somewhere above the ledge. "I bet that's important." She placed the ladder beside the wall where a storage cabinet also sat, creating a makeshift staircase for us to get up.

There wasn't any pull in my chest or flare in my power that urged me to check it out like there was with the barrier, but it was the only lead we had so far.

Haera ascended the ladder first to make sure it was safe, checking to make sure it would hold our weights and that there was nothing else lurking on the ledge that would seek to harm us. Once she gave us the all-clear, Larc offered his hand to help me keep me balanced as I climbed over the ladder and cabinet, steadying me as I swayed. The tower was crumbling to pieces, so I prayed the ledge would hold us all.

The first thing I noticed when I reached the top was how small the area was. A desk was pushed into the corner and was surrounded by more dust-coated bookshelves. Paper and pieces of parchment, which appeared to have been a feast for silverfish over the past years, were strewn across the desk and illuminated by a small orb of glowing azure.

I stepped closer towards the light to get a look at the enchanting sight. Held up by a metal rod was a glass ball, one no larger than my fingertip. Even with its small size, a large amount of power was endlessly burning inside, expelling blue light around us as it did so. Considering the place looked untouched, it had to have been glowing for years on end.

Larc and Haera approached the desk too, reaching for the papers to search through their contents. Unlike the books we had scoured through, these had strange symbols written on them and carefully drawn illustrations.

The Dragon-born's hands shook as he picked up one that had been ripped in half. "It's the missing pieces of the script my queen was studying."

Haera and I gathered around the seed of hope we wished would be the answer to our problem. The picture that had been torn through looked to be the bottom of a Lyre, the stringed instrument glowing with blue sparks surrounding it, and several dark creatures running towards it.

"That's the Lyre," I gasped in awe. Lines of symbols ran below it and I assumed it described the illustration above.

"It's a shame we can't read what it says," Haera said as she furrowed her brows. "It would have been really useful."

"I can read it." Larc's face had paled, his eyes scanning the symbols over and over as if what they held couldn't be true. "It's in Kaeuni, the tongue of the Dragon-born."

"What does it say?" I pushed. If we could find out where the Lyre was now without a whole day even passing, we could make great progress in saving everyone before the other Dragon-born soldiers arrived.

"It doesn't make too much sense in the modern version of the language, but it's something about a shadow lure. The Lyre pulls darkness towards it."

"What else?" Haera questioned. "I can tell there's something else there that you haven't said."

"It also says it is to be kept in the highest peaks of the sturdiest rock." He let the paper fall back to the desk, floating down as if it were a snowflake ready to blanket the land in a layer of snow.

"It's in the mountains."